tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-75395389013488078152024-02-08T14:22:28.052-05:00The Breadcrumb SagaFinding the trail with books, movies, music, websites, podcasts...Ted Knighthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00891911185898038632noreply@blogger.comBlogger42125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7539538901348807815.post-9656802744502931832020-04-05T15:44:00.000-04:002020-04-05T15:44:17.618-04:00<br />
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<li>outlanddr this outstanding series from Starz r- educates me to learnistory than cool lege cl as s tweenes English anollegehdclaßed Scots a much less psinful way to </li>
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Ted Knighthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00891911185898038632noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7539538901348807815.post-19767473931516005662013-02-10T19:00:00.000-05:002020-04-05T14:05:34.581-04:00Because they can...Vincent Flanders, in his most excellent <a href="http://websitesthatsuck.com/" target="_blank">Websites That Suck</a>, says that the worst reason to use a feature in a web design is "because you can." This is how we end up with flashing red-alternating-with-blue text, an instant headache for most of us and possibly capable of inducing a seizure in a significant minority, and a host of other sensory and cognitive insults.<br />
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Check out Flanders' withering scorn as per "Mystery Meat Navigation." You'll know you've seen it as soon as you read the description. Oh, all right, it's the mysterious navigational buttons disguised as teddy bears, or toy locomotives, or jagged edges, or anything except what custom tells us a button should look like. A lot like the "mystery meat" we used to get at school lunch counters, right?<br />
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It seems to me that Microsoft is horribly guilty of "because we can" when it comes to new versions of Windows, and Office, and God knows what else. I thought Win 95 replacing v. 3.1 was a really good idea, and I still do. Win 98 required a bit of a learning curve but was surely needed. Millennium? Widely regarded as a dud, a true step backward. Fortunately it was gone too quickly for me to encounter it much directly. Win XP, especially XP Pro, was one I really liked and still like. A lot. And its successor, Vista, was another one widely dismissed. I didn't care why but I was glad to stick with XP Pro as long as I could.<br />
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Next came Windows 7. Let's pause and talk about the successive learning curves. Why did Redmond (insider-ish slang for Microsquish, after the Washington city where it is headquartered - Wikipedia calls it a metonym - I just learned something) find it necessary to abandon the start button and resulting menus, after the angst we invested in learning it in the first place? Come to think of it, why did Win XP force a choice between two versions of the dang Start button menu? Every time a willing-to-help co-worker landed at another desk and found a different Start menu than the one they expected, it was like a Redmond Raspberry, a thumb to the nose for daring to invade the sacred domain of techies. Sheesh...<br />
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There are a bunch of other changes and we could ask, why? Because they could, is the best I can come up with.<br />
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A tech-savvy friend says a pattern is well-known that every other Windows release was good and every other one bad. This forced us faith-in-the-latest types to keep moving forward until at some point we became no-faith-in-pointless-changes acolytes, and clung to older versions.<br />
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The same is true of Office. How many people change their default Style in Word 2007 to the 2003 Style, raise your hands? That's what I thought. When you finally found out how to fix the supremely irritating 2007 default of Enter producing a double-space rather than a single line break, you finally found out how to fix it, probably by Google search rather than the opaque resident Help file, and gained brownie points by gleefully sharing the <a href="http://voices.yahoo.com/change-double-space-default-word-7222792.html" target="_blank">method</a> with friends and co-workers.<br />
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I finally bit the bullet and replaced my trusty, but five-year-old, Win XP Pro machine. I beat the introduction of Windows 8 by a couple of weeks so I got Windows 7, which at least was a devil I knew. My wife's PC, bought at the same time as my old one, wasn't so lucky. The hard drive failed the very day before Wind 8 was to come out. I knew this and rushed to the store where I got an "open box" deal on a Win 7 machine, and felt awfully lucky. Best Buy and Office Depot were to have no Win 7 PC's for sale the following day.<br />
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Win 8, by the way, is apparently as rough on the uninitiated as reported when it came out. I deduce this by the slew of machines now being offered online with Win 7 instead of 8. Shopping today for an HP, I even found a new machine capable of booting to Win <strong>7 </strong>or XP.<br />
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It came with pre-installed Office 2010 but I didn't go for it. I had my full retail disc for Office 2007 and installed it instead.<br />
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Today while shopping (for a friend) I was at <a href="http://buycheapsoftware.com/" target="_blank">my favorite software site</a> and found something interesting One reason I love this site is they sell "legacy" versions as well as the latest and supposedly greatest. Turns out Office 2007 is about $100 more than Office 2010. Maybe it's that American tradition, supply and demand, at work. <br />
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I could talk about the way Adobe poop-canned Cool Edit Pro after they bought it from Syntrillium, replacing it with <a href="http://www.adobe.com/special/products/audition/syntrillium.html" target="_blank">Adobe Audition</a> at $100 more, and an even pricier audio editor as part of a big old suite. Worst part was the Audition normalizer was inferior to the one in Cool Edit. I had lost my installer for Cool Edit with the old PC so I sprang for Audition, but eventually abandoned it for a copy of Cool Edit I found online for $15. I won't go into the way software companies (MS and Adobe are not the only ones, of course) gobble up competition, shut them down, and replace them with more expensive but less functional, albeit shinier, versions. Nope. Not me. Won't go there.<br />
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Because they can. But they shouldn't. And we shouldn't go along. Doncha think?Ted Knighthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00891911185898038632noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7539538901348807815.post-62419517004822763752012-11-24T21:09:00.000-05:002012-11-24T21:11:09.907-05:00What is real?"Movies that fool us into confusing illusion with reality." Is this a movie genre? It should be.<br />
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Lots of these are from books. I might have thought <em>The Wizard of Oz </em>was an early example<em> </em>but then I think of <em>Alice in Wonderland </em>from the previous century. I bet the Greeks and Romans had their versions, for that matter. But I want to talk about the modern weird stuff. <br />
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<em>Fight Club. </em>Sure had me fooled, and the main character was no better off. Reading the book first was good for me, and I still enjoyed the movie, maybe more so.<br />
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<em>Altered States. </em>Woof. Unfortunately my memory is more attuned to impressions than to plot but the overwhelming thing I took away from this was how William Hurt's wowzer of a performance scared the bejeezus out of me. Isolation tanks? No thank you, not for me.<br />
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<em>Videodrome. </em>A strange TV program seems to suck viewers into an alternate universe or some such. The first viewing really grabbed me but a second try many years later was disappointing. The idea that watching too much tube can rot your brain could be a subgenre. To wit, the little girl who disappears into TV land in <em>Poltergeist, </em>and the part of <em>Twilight Zone, the Movie, </em>in which a character is unable to escape from a horrific TV cartoon. Come to think of it, this was drawn from the original TV series, which was way before <em>Videodrome</em>. Maybe the writer was a Rod Serling fan.<br />
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<em>Fringe. </em>This is a TV show, not a movie, but since a <em>Fringe </em>marathon I've been watching the past two days on the Science Channel is what prompted this, my first post in over a year, it gets a mention. There's lots of stuff about dream states, isolation tanks, brain waves and other "fringe science." One episode is about an embittered computer programmer. He invents a program that invades computers via the Internet, putting up hyonotic images as a virtual hand slowly proceeds from the screen. The hand suddenly clamps down on the viewer's head, liquefying the brain. Ewww... <br />
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<em>The Matrix. </em>This one <strong>really </strong>fooled me. If you've not seen it, no spoiler here. I admired the storytelling and the advanced computer graphics.<br />
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<em>The Sixth Sense. </em>Another one I never saw coming, but I bet a lot of people did. Director M. Night Shyamalan seems to like exploring this terrain. Check out his <em>Unbreakable, </em>with Samuel L. Jackson as a dude with a secret agenda it's hard to see coming..<br />
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<em>Jacob's Ladder. </em>Tim Robbins wonders if he might be doomed to permanent flashbacks from drugs administered during his tour in Vietnam. Is anything what it seems? A lot less well-known but right up there with <em>Altered States.</em><br />
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<em>Perception</em>. Another TV show, features a genius schizophrenic who intentionally avoids his meds, using his hallucinations to help an FBI agent solve crimes. The agent has a monster crush on the crazy guy, who was once her college professor. Actually this is another sub-genre I'll call "square peg genius finds way to fit round hole and solve crimes." Take<em> The Mentalist - </em>a reformed con man, formerly a psychic, helps a very attractive FBI agent solve crimes. Coincendentally, she also has a crush on her helper. <em>Numbers - </em>father and son geniuses use math to solve crimes, I forget which one is with law enforcement and which is the quirky one. Shows and movies like this always involve supervisors itching to get rid of the nonconformist genius, but they're so good at what they do that the boss can't afford to shut them out. Like the punchline of the old joke...because we need the eggs. If you don't know the gag, you could look it up.<br />
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<em>Brazil. </em>Director Terry Gilliam is one weird dude. Mind control is the tool of a relentless bureaucracy. I finally saw it a second time just the other day, many many years after the first viewing. Shades of <em>Brave New World </em>with a sick comic twist. If I ever get Netflix or Hulu I'm going to go through Terry Gilliam's films one by one. I've already seen <em>Time Bandits, And Now for Something Completely Different, The Life of Brian, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, </em>and <em>The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, </em>and I'd like to see them all again. Looking at the <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000416/">list of Gilliam's movies on IMDB</a>, <em>Jabberwocky </em>is one I want to check out.<br />
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The fearsome Jabberwock brings us full circle back to Lewis Carroll and <em>Alice, </em>and with that I bid you good night.Ted Knighthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00891911185898038632noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7539538901348807815.post-17922279412875517962011-06-09T14:32:00.006-04:002011-07-25T13:08:25.782-04:00Mental Health Happy HourThe title grabbed me when I saw it on the list of newer podcasts at the iTunes store. The description nailed it when it turned out to feature interviews with creative types dealing with mental illness, especially depression. That's me all over, my friend. A musician who's been taking Prozac for years and not shy talking about it, firm in the conviction that depression can be better understood if we don't try to hide it from each other. On the other hand, my more serious bout with mental illness from college days is something I won't write about publicly, but will still discuss with people I get to know pretty well.<br /><br />Anyway, this was my latest venture into podcasts, the 21st century medium (late 20th, actually, but if you won't tell then I won't) that I find astonishingly fertile. We're talking Inquiring Minds Want to Know here, of course, and major breadcrumb city.<br /><br />The Mental Health Happy Hour host is Paul Gilmartin, a professional comedian who is not shy about discussing his own adventures with depression, including frank revelations about his early life. Many of the guests are fellow comedians, people he happens to know, but the show is very young and I imagine that as it develops there could be musicians, visual artists, and other people like you and me who work with depression to varying degrees of success and are willing to talk about it.<br /><br />Some guests also touch on religion and spirituality, although this is not by any means a "Put your hand on the radio and receive the blessing of..." vehicle. There are references to 12-step recovery but it is not an online AA meeting either. There is talk of childhood privation and even abuse, but neither is this a radio shrinkfest, and Paul is careful to disclaim same on his website and on the programs.<br /><br />If you follow the link at the top of this post you will land on Paul's podcast page. I especially recommend the interview with Adam Carolla for his sensible and practical advice at the end of the hour, and the one with Murph, ex-con, for its frankness in dealing with criminality and violence, and where they may come from. Murph, despite being an Irish hood you might have expected to come from Boston or New York, is like Paul and most of his guests a resident of California.<br /><br />Look at some other pages, too. Paul's own blog is there and gets some comments. Hundreds of people have taken an anonymous poll and the results are public without any names, of course. The comments and poll answers seem thoughtful and serious, which is really saying something when it comes to online discourse.<br /><br />If the show title grabs you like it did me, check it out. If you like it, maybe click the PayPal button and send a few bucks. I haven't yet but I will. Keep on truckin', Paul.Ted Knighthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00891911185898038632noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7539538901348807815.post-33574808868665876072011-05-10T11:04:00.003-04:002011-05-10T11:33:32.106-04:00Hygiene HypothesisBreadcrumbs, by which I mean tidbits of information that help me find my way, are coming thick and fast now that I've discovered podcasts. This morning I listened to Science Talk, a half-hour show from Scientific American, on the Hygiene Hypothesis. The title is "Can It Be Bad to Be Too Clean?"<br /><br />The idea is that we can be too clean, too quick to wipe out microbes, and this change from earlier, dirtier environments has been so fast that the delicate balance of pathogens and our bodily responses has been affected. On the podcast Johns Hopkins researcher Kathleen Barnes mentioned two specific types of immune responses. One is geared toward microbes, and the other toward worms or parasites. It seems that when challenges to one are absent in early childhood, the other one gets out of whack. At least, this was my understanding. You can see the summary on this Scientific American <a href="http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode.cfm?id=can-it-be-bad-to-be-too-clean-the-h-11-04-06">webpage</a>.<br /><br />Here's an excerpt from <a href="http://www.hygienehypothesis.org/">www.hygienehypothesis.org</a> :<br /><br /><em>Eliminating typhoid and cholera has saved millions of lives in the aggregate since sewers and clean drinking water were introduced in North American and Western Europe for instance. But in so doing we contributed to the rise of the modern diseases involving immune dysregulation, like Multiple Sclerosis, Crohn's, Ulcerative Colitis, Graves Disease, Hashimoto's Thyroiditis, Type I Diabetes, Asthma, Allergy, Coeliac Disease, and Sjogren's Syndrome.</em><br /><em></em><br />I played in the dirt a lot as a kid in the suburbs of Indianapolis. I ate strawberries from the banks of the shallow drainage ditch behind our house, and built mud dams all the time. This was outer suburbia, one house away from working cornfields.<br /><br />I happen to be completely free of allergies, although my mother had a severe life-threatening allergy to shrimp. By the way, I am diabetic Type 2. Mere anecdotal evidence, of course. Your mileage may vary.Ted Knighthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00891911185898038632noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7539538901348807815.post-50516080528140369902011-05-06T13:35:00.003-04:002011-05-06T14:25:49.835-04:00LegsWhen I was writing 30-second radio spots, as much as I wanted to make sparkling little masterpieces, the overriding priority was to crank 'em out and get 'er done. It makes sense, since as often as not I would rip the last page out of the manual typewriter (this <strong>was </strong>a few years back) and carry my stack of work to the production room where I proceeded to voice, add music, and dub to cartridge as many as a dozen or so, all in the space of an hour. An hour from starting at the typewriter, not from walking into the studio.<br /><br />Nobody wants to run the same commercial year and in year out, and even if they did, we desperately craved some variety as much as our poor listeners. The alternatives? Rest the advertiser a while, then bring 'em back on. Or - write new spots and keep 'em running. Uh, guess which one always won out?<br /><br />So if I had to write a fresh new angle every time, well, you can imagine how unrealistic that would be with the kind of crank-'em-out pressure we were under. The goal became to find a concept with "legs," meaning spots that could hammer home the same selling pitch but with enough slight variations to make them easy to churn out, masquerading as fresh, or as the TV networks will trumpet, "All new!" Yeah, right.<br /><br />The big boys look for the same thing. That's how you get the AFLAC duck. Bookend him with any scene you like, as long as he shouts "AFLAC" at some point, you've got another winner. Easy to write, easy to sell, and not even too irritating for us viewers. The hardest part is coming up with the concept in the first place, but boy is it worth the effort when you find one with "legs."<br /><br />And now, back to the continuing adventures...In our last blog post, bookworm Ted was wondering why he's lost interest in episodic TV. As we rejoin his confused mental maunderings, let's see if he's made any progress mit zis puzzlement...<br /><br />Maybe Shakespeare wasn't trying for home run masterpieces when he did all those Henrys and Richards. Maybe he was just trying to earn a living. Maybe Coppola wasn't even trying to make a sequel even more highly regarded than the original (Godfathers I and II), it just happened that way when he was trying to make the best movies he could to put butts in the seats and a (nice) roof over his family's head. Maybe Sue Grafton isn't trying to write <em>D Is for Dostoevsky </em>after all, and the guys who dreamed up <em>The Honeymooners </em>for Gleason and Carney weren't thinking, "How can we put them in a situation in sync with the dramatic arc?" Maybe they were all just looking for concepts with legs.<br /><br />And my point? As much as I loved <em>MASH </em>and <em>House </em>and <em>Upstairs, Downstairs </em>and <em>Happy Days </em>and <em>Eight Is Enough </em>and all the other silly and wonderful and heartbreaking TV shows I have loved over the years, maybe I have come to prefer the stand-alone work to the concept with legs.<br /><br />I don't think the Coen brothers have written any recurring characters, nor has Woody Allen. "A" for effort, for doing everything from scratch instead of starting from a mix. Although I must confess a real fondness for Sherlock Holmes, and Sayres' Lord Peter Wimsey, and any number of other recurring characters. Of course, this betrays my preference for reading. Most days I'd rather re-read a favorite novel than try to get interested in any newer TV series.<br /><br />Yes, I loved seeing Newhart walk off the elevator, and chanting "Hi, Bob" with my dorm buddies and the cast on screen. I loved hearing the Skipper call Gilligan "Little Buddy," and all the other catch phrases built in to these things over the years. I may even come to love them again.<br /><br />But for now, stand-alone movies and books and TV shows and podcasts are holding my attention even when outstanding work like episode 2 of <em>Game of Thrones </em>leaves me indifferent.<br /><br />To be fair, some artists produce work along similar lines almost like a series, even when they don't mean to. Novelist Joanne Harris doesn't write a recurring character like Grafton's Kinsey Milhone, but she keeps writing about unusual single women of mystery with daughters, living in small villages. And Richard Russo seems to have a thing with diners. Both great novelists, though, and probably not intentionally setting out to repeat themselves.<br /><br />Just one more thing. I really am enjoying my newfound appreciation for podcasts. The latest <em>This American Life </em>with Ira Glass is called "Prom." One part of the podcast is an interview with Francine Pascal, author of the Sweet Valley High series of novels for teenagers, some 35 of which involve a high school prom in some way. You think that's a lot of books? Not even close. Wikipedia says there are 183 novels in the first series alone, and several spinoffs have followed.<br /><br />On the podcast, the author says there are 500 Sweet Valley books out now. Ghostwriters are involved, of course. Do you think any of them rise to the level of Harris's <em>Chocolat </em>or Russo's <em>Empire Falls? </em>Seems doubtful.<br /><br />The punchline - HBO made a tremendous four-part mini-series from <em>Empire Falls. </em>You could make the case that the novel was too long and complex to fit in just two or three hours. Or you could say that HBO figured they'd found something with legs.<br /><br />You know that feeling of dread that comes when you hear a great movie has been turned into a series? Sometimes it works out well, like <em>American Graffiti </em>and <em>Happy Days. </em>But even in the best-case scenario, would anyone really argue that catchphrases from the Fonz ("Heyyyy...") measure up to the movie's more considerable weight?<br /><br />What do you think?Ted Knighthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00891911185898038632noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7539538901348807815.post-87545799245608285922011-05-06T11:57:00.008-04:002011-05-06T12:34:47.752-04:00The continuing adventures...Are we hardwired to like serial narratives? With <em>Rocky 5 </em>and its ilk clogging our cultural bandwidth, why wasn't there a <em>Hamlet 2? </em>But a <a href="http://boarshead.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=plays&action=display&thread=116">fellow blogger</a> remembers Richard II and III and Henry IV, V, and VI, so it would seem even ol' Bill was hip to the jive. O erudite reader, point out even earlier serials if ye can.<br /><br />These thoughts came to mind as I wonder why I have lost my interest in episodic television. I'm hardly a TV snob. I ingested weekly doses of countless half-sitcoms and hour-long dramatic series over the years, from <em>Gilligan's Island </em>to <em>West Wing </em>and <em>House. </em>But a few years ago my serial-attention span dwindled and seems to have gone away for good. Hmm...<br /><br />Let's see, in the 70s <em>Mash </em>and <em>All in the Family </em>and <em>Mary Tyler Moore, </em>check. In the 80s, uh, I'll get back to you but I know I watched a lot of stuff even if I can't bring it as readily to mind. By the 90s I'm still there but getting fragmented. <em>Law and Order, CSI, </em>lots of cops and action but also <em>Picket Fences, Northern Exposure, </em>quirky comedies making my day and my week.<br /><br />The HBO original series make a better test case even if this will leave behind those who don't subscribe. Maybe the point will come through regardless. <em>Oz </em>was gripping and horrific and I watched it every week even when I thought it would make me sick. Sort of the "horror film" effect, I guess, no regrets. By the time of <em>Six Feet Under </em>I was still riveted by several seasons worth but finally drifted away near the bitter end. This was also pretty hard to take, set in a funeral home with lots of gay love and dysfunctional family stuff, but that's all okay with me. Something else was happening to my viewing radar.<br /><br />Came the <em>Sopranos </em>and baby, I was there! I agree with those who called it the best thing on television, maybe ever, and despite (or maybe because of) the brutal violence and the psychological suspense I watched it every week. I even loved the bringdown finale.<br /><br />Then came <em>Big Love. </em>Watched two episodes, recognized yet another series of extremely high quality, and simply tuned out. <em>Boardwalk Empire </em>- only managed three episodes even though I am a huge fan of its star, Steve Buscemi. I've even watched the lesser-known movie in which he directed himself. It's called <em><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0117958/">Trees Lounge</a>, </em>if you'd like to check it out.<br /><br />The final straw, the newest HBO series, <em>Game of Thrones. </em>Watched the sneak preview, then avidly stayed with the first episode the following Sunday, right to the shocking ending, which I won't spoil here. It appears to be everything I would hope for from another stellar HBO original production...and yet the following week I simply didn't want to see what happens next.<br /><br />Is this happening to you too? Is it our age? Or the age in which we are living? Thoughts about what the heck is going on in our next installment. So...don't touch that dial!Ted Knighthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00891911185898038632noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7539538901348807815.post-87727333380621135282011-04-20T11:34:00.005-04:002011-04-20T12:50:34.559-04:00Uncle MiltieCaught the second half of my first podcast this morning, from Skepticality. An expert on human factors engineering mentioned "angry birds," which I learned is a game application. The way that he and the interviewer talked about the game made it plain that to them, it's a cultural reference people would recognize. But it was new to me.<br /><br />Got me thinking. There was a time when if an American referred to Uncle Miltie, "everyone" knew it meant Milton Berle, host of an incredibly popular TV show dating from 1948. Fast forward to the 70s and shows like <em>All in the Family </em>were just as recognizable.<br /><br />As cable caught on, audiences gradually went to niche favorites. At the office lunchroom, referring to an MTV video or the latest HBO offering might be met with puzzled looks. Later HBO became more widely viewed, but references to shows seen only on Showtime or another less popular pay channel would be of interest to smaller and smaller segments of the lunchroom crowd.<br /><br />Now we have Facebook, the biggest online community to date, but even so, far from universally accepted although "everyone" has heard of it by now. Mention Twitter or Skype, especially to an older person, and get the same puzzled look a 1952 Ubangi might have registered with a mention of Uncle Miltie.<br /><br />Cultural references are always limiting. A sports fan who learns how narrowly sports fandom is actually distributed will be astonished, considering the attention given to sports by media and in small talk. A Greek scholar is not surprised to find a reference to Euripedes drawing blanks, and a sophisticate may well revel in the insularity of <em>New Yorker </em>magazine, getting considerable satisfaction from the idea that the yokels in the heartland simply have no clue as to what's going on. There's a lot of middle ground, and considerate people are careful not to indulge in snobbery when they use references that may be niche rather than for "everyone." Snobs, of course, love to beat us with their superiority. "You MUST have heard of Dolce and Gabbana!" A high-end brand of handbags...I think.<br /><br />After I introduced my friend Dave (aka Also Ted) to the writings of S.J. Perelman, he mentioned how much he enjoyed sorting out cultural references from the circle of sophisticates that Perelman catered to, and to which he belonged. Inside jokes abound, and like my friend, I enjoyed deciphering the offhand references as a kind of code of belonging.<br /><br />I'm not old enough to have watched Uncle Miltie, but I'm old enough to know about him. No one living is old enough to have heard Euripedes speak, but plenty of people may have read about him. Not enough to put him in same recognition class as MTV or Facebook, of course, but somewhere out in front of true esoterica.<br /><br />For example, the proper term for a shrunken head from the Amazon is <em>tsantsa. </em>Instead of "How 'bout those Mets?" at the lunch table, imagine the reaction you might get from saying "Saw a fascinating <em>tsantsa </em>at the British Museum on my last visit." Pedantry, anyone?<br /><br />Getting back to the podcast, it was reasonable for a couple of hipsters to mention "angry birds" without explanation. As a hipster wannabe, I was able to decipher the code just as I deciphered Perelman's references to the Algonquin Round Table.<br /><br />But I think the age of more universal cultural references is over. Most of us live in niches now. Even the Super Bowl and the Oscars show don't really reach "everyone" any more. Pretty much everyone has heard of the Apple iPhone, but lots and lots of people either can't afford it or choose to ignore it. Compare to Milton Berle or Archie Bunker, which people could get for free. I doubt we'll ever see the like again.<br /><br />And we didn't even get to pop music. Free radio broadcasts made Harry James and the Beatles household words. I tried to keep up for many years with subscriptions to <em>Rolling Stone </em>and <em>Billboard, </em>which is really expensive, and finally gave up. I accepted the fact I would not and could not remain forever hip (assuming I ever was!) and moved on. So when I read that Jay-Z is virtually a cultural icon now, it doesn't bother me in the least to ask, "Who?"Ted Knighthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00891911185898038632noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7539538901348807815.post-8502120338295709552011-04-19T10:31:00.005-04:002011-04-19T11:04:32.359-04:00PodcastsEvery time I think I've reached my limit, that at my age I just don't have the energy to follow yet another of the endlessly bifurcating trails of breadcrumbs that technology keeps throwing at me, I summon a little courage and try something new.<br /><br />I heard about podcasts a long time ago but had always relegated them to "things too new and complicated for me to try." With a new vehicle and the decision whether to spend money to install my fancy radio with XM, I wondered if playing podcasts on my iPod might be a no-cost alternative to the $12 a month or so I've been paying XM for eight years.<br /><br />Started with Google and proceeded to the Wikipedia page, which told me pretty much everything I needed to know. The easiest way for fearful folk like me is to open iTunes, click Podcasts on the top bar, and go shopping. I stuck with free ones, which abound. Downloaded two past shows from This American Life, which I always enjoyed on XM, and subscribed to receive auto-downloads weekly. Also grabbed shows from Skepticality and The Partially Examined Life, two titles I found intriguing.<br /><br />Next I saved links to some other podcast sources listed by Google such as Podbean and fluctu8 for future investigation. Finally I visited XMPR, knowing I would find the free weekend podcast of the Bob Edwards Show. I downloaded eleven past shows and subscribed to this one too. I was delighted to see the site let me choose iPod-ready versions. Talk about painless.<br /><br />Yesterday I plugged my iPod into my new car's aux input, ready to enjoy something thought-provoking on my half-hour commute. The darned thing was frozen, technology refusing to play ball. I shrugged it off and last night after plugging and unplugging it to my USB port a few times, it played fine.<br /><br />Drum roll, please...<br /><br />This morning I plugged it in and everything worked as promised. I listened to the first half of an hour show from Skepticality magazine. Breadcrumbs a-plenty poured from the factory radio's cheap speakers as this cheap listener enjoyed the same kind of intellectual stimulation that paid XM had been providing over the years. What a trip! to use the language of my semi-greatest generation.<br /><br />And what a long strange trip it's been. Gutenberg and books, Hollywood and movies, Edison and the phonograph, then cassettes, CDs, MP3s, and now the MP3 incarnation of the talk show, the podcast. And all I had to do was give it a try, not so hard after all.Ted Knighthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00891911185898038632noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7539538901348807815.post-44074845386234640812011-02-16T15:22:00.012-05:002011-02-16T15:50:07.799-05:00A job is a job<em>Repo Men, </em>the 2010 movie with Jude Law and Forrest Whittaker, gives a chilling meaning to the common phrase "a job is a job." Their job is to track down organ recipients behind on the payments and repossess said organs. It's a Taser job, quick but far from painless, and Law's character Remy is the best repo man there is until he unwittingly gets a new heart (and a massive debt) of his own.<br /><br />Along with the literal heart comes something strange to him, an inability to do at all what he had been doing unflinchingly before. It's a compassionate "heart" he finds, and Whittaker's character grows impatient with Remy's complete loss of the attitude that repo men need, that a job is a job.<br /><br />I can't remember the exact quote but at one point Remy corrects his partner by saying something to the effect that a job is not just a job, that what you do is what you are. Although the movie has been panned as awful, I got a lot out of this particular pearl of wisdom. I came away determined to remind myself that even though what I do is defined not by my Joe-job but rather what I choose to do when I can, what my Joe-job has me do does in fact matter.<br /><br />By the way, Joe-job is a wonderful phrase I picked up either from <em>Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure </em>or from <em>Wayne's World, </em>I forget which movie. Clearly I am not just into touchy-feely sensitive flicks, but I usually find stuff to think about in even the flimsiest fodder.<br /><br />Would I execute people for a living? Would I be a prison guard? Would I deny coverage to people with health insurance? I won't condemn those who do these things, but I can choose not to do those things myself. Should I keep doing what I do now for my Joe-job, or should I pursue a job with more social relevance? Should I be willing to work for less, not that I'm making all that much now, to make a change in that direction?<br /><br />To be continued.Ted Knighthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00891911185898038632noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7539538901348807815.post-40867029955480959112011-02-16T10:51:00.008-05:002011-02-16T13:30:28.911-05:00Belief and ironyIn 1951, the year I was born, Edward R. Murrow brought a new program to the radio airwaves. <em><a href="http://thisibelieve.org/essay/16844/">This I Believe</a> </em>aired weekly audio essays by prominent and respected people who talked frankly about their deepest and most cherished beliefs.<br /><br /><br />Years later, Bob Edwards began airing the original segments at the end of each Friday broadcast on his public radio program. For example, noted anthroplogist <a href="http://thisibelieve.org/essays/listen/classic/page/10/">Margaret Mead's original talk</a> aired July 17, 2009 on XMPR.<br /><br /><br />I started making a point of listening Fridays around 8:45. Then one week instead of a historic essay I heard a modern-day effort, not by a celebrity but by regular folks who submit their work. These are not always as long as the early ones, but then less is often more. They are all heartfelt, however, and often deeply moving.<br /><br /><br />The work continues under the guidance of distinguished public radio producer <a href="http://thisibelieve.org/credits/">Dan Gediman</a>. The website offers books for sale and a chance to support the project using PayPal.<br /><br /><br />There might have been a time when most everyone agreed on the value of cherished beliefs, but that time seems to have passed. Although satire dates from Mark Twain in the 1800s and Swift's <em>Gulliver's Travels </em>in the 1700s (if not back to ancient Greece), somewhere along the way it became fashionable to express rampant disbelief with ironic humor.<br /><br /><br />David Letterman could be the poster child for this attitude, even though I suspect his on-air persona is as much pose as personality. <em><a href="http://www.theonion.com/">The Onion</a> </em>could be the "newspaper" for the ironic generation, who I would dub <em>postmoderns. </em>The <a href="http://www.dmoz.org/Recreation/Humor/Satire/">Satire category</a> in the Open Directory Project has collected dozens of links amounting to a fairly complete course in modern satire.<br /><br /><em></em><br />People strive to be cool to short-circuit rejection. I think we adopt an ironic pose from a similar fear of admitting to beliefs only to have them belittled. The most ironic person "wins" this game of one-upmanship, although society may well be the loser.<br /><br /><br />Have you seen TV ads for ethical behavior? You know, the ones showing people being kind or considerate, and how much it can mean to someone? I've seen billboards and bus stop signs asking us to stop the violence, and we've all heard talk about the need to return to civility in public discourse.<br /><br /><br />Choosing sincerity over irony seems like a step in that direction and it's something anyone can do. Sincerity can become a habit as surely as the sarcasm it should replace. Listening to <em>This I Believe </em>can prime the pump, and who knows, maybe you or I will write and record a <em>This I Believe </em>of our own.Ted Knighthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00891911185898038632noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7539538901348807815.post-81511469922824473812010-08-29T21:03:00.012-04:002011-03-21T14:55:27.536-04:00Too many secretsDid you see <em>Sneakers? </em>In this 1992 movie, Robert Redford plays the head of a private security company. He and his team are brainstorming to figure out whether the name of a firm they are investigating, Seatec Astronomy, has some hidden significance.<br /><br />They spread out some Scrabble tiles and start anagramming the company's name, stopping when they are able to rearrange the letters to spell "too many secrets." I'll leave the significance of the decrypted name to your viewing of the movie, along with a warning that the IMDB site and several others blithely give away way too much of the plot.<br /><br />I will reveal, however, that the movie centers on whether a device that can automatically decrypt classified government secrets should be allowed to exist. This seems more relevant than ever all these years after the film's release, with the <a href="http://wikileaks.org/">WikiLeaks</a> controversy in the news. Leaving aside the movie's focus on cryptography, the question remains as to what legitmate function secrecy plays in government, and how much should be considered secret.<br /><br />Some weeks before I became aware of WikiLeaks, I came across a book called <em>Code Names, </em>by William M. Arkin of <em>The Washington Post</em>. I was surprised to learn that a book with such content could be published, but on looking further I found that this was not even Arkin's debut foray into uncovering supposedly classified information. His previous books gave locations of US nuclear weapons installations, which I would have thought was so highly sensitive that it could not possibly have appeared.<br /><br />What I learned was that everything in both Arkin books was in the public record. I also read his assertion that even though it was all publicly available, he considered what to include and what to omit with painstaking care.<br /><br />My shot at <em>Code Names </em>was too brief for me to read more than the introduction and the first couple of chapters. This is oddly parallel to a more recent experience with a book by Ray Kurzweil, described in the post just ahead of this one. What I read turned out to be plenty, as most of the rest of the book was simply a reference list of code names as they have been used.<br /><br />The first part summed it up nicely, however, and my own summary of the summary would be that since 9/11, our government and its intelligence agencies have used that terrible tragedy as pretext to classify everything and anything. This has gone to extremes that would be ridiculous except that since real life and real issues are involved, outrageous is the better word.<br /><br />I hadn't paid enough attention to Arkin's bio on the flyleaf but with a little online research quickly discovered that books are only part of his real work as investigative reporter for the <em>Post</em>. My take is that he is more a bulldog and journeyman than an ideologue, which I find a good thing. I naturally suspect people who take on causes with excessive zeal, much preferring a dogged determination to report what is there to the fervor that produces slanted coverage. Fair and balanced, forsooth!<br /><br />To get to the point, where Arkin started plowing in 2005 with <em>Code Names,</em> a dozen <em>The Washington Post </em>journalists headed by Dana Priest harvested the crop in July 2010 with a series entitled <em><a href="http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/">Top Secret America</a></em>. This investigative journalism project was two years in the making. The main link leads to many, many other links, including a <a href="http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/articles/">list of articles</a> and a <a href="http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/articles/methodology/">summary of methodology</a>.<br /><br />Too many secrets? Even though the information is in the public record, mostly online, it is so insanely complicated that Arkin says he couldn't do what he does without help from the inside. We can safely conclude that these are people outraged by what has happened in their workplace since 9/11.<br /><br />A <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07/22/AR2010072205892.html">letter to the editor</a> from a retired intelligence professional says the current state of affairs bears little resemblance to the intelligence community he remembers. He seems outraged that these excesses have been allowed to flourish, but not upset at all that <em>The Post </em>is bringing them to light.<br /><br />There is a real concern underlying all this outrage and zeal, and that is the enormous expense incurred when too much is made too secret. The money wasted in this process is breathtaking even by government standards. Even if you think you don't especially care whether government is using secrecy excessively, once you get a glimpse of how much money is being flushed down this particular gold-plated toilet you may be reminded of the historic advice from Deep Throat to <em>Post </em>reporters<em> </em>of an earlier time, "follow the money."Ted Knighthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00891911185898038632noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7539538901348807815.post-39824111774055951102010-08-29T19:38:00.009-04:002010-08-29T21:02:15.898-04:00History of the futureSomewhere along the breadcrumb trail I must have decided I didn't need to keep my copy of Marshall McLuhan's book <em><a href="http://www.gingkopress.com/02-mcl/medium-is-massage.html">The Medium Is the Massage</a>, </em>because it's no longer on my shelves. I would have liked to consult it today when I came home from a weekend jaunt visiting a friend who introduced me to a book I had never heard of by a writer I thought I knew.<br /><br />The writer is <a href="http://www.kurzweilai.net/">Ray Kurzweil</a>. I knew him as the inventor of the Kurzweil keyboard, regarded as an ultra-high-quality electronic musical instrument since its introduction in 1984. What I didn't know was that this was only one of many inventions by a man who has been compared to Thomas Edison, nor that his writings on the future of technology and society put him in the exalted ranks of McLuhan, Alvin Toffler, and the like.<br /><br />The book was <a href="http://www.kurzweilai.net/the-singularity-is-near"><em>The Singularity Is Near</em></a><em>. </em>It's fantastic to visit a friend and discover a book so unexpected and so profound, a long way from the beach fodder one might be content to find.<br /><br />I knew "singularity" as the term used by physicists to denote the collapse of gravity at the center of a black hole. I learned that futurists have adopted it to mean a period of cultural change so rapid and so deep that human society will be irreversibly altered. They see technological advances as the agency of this change.<br /><br />The rate of technological change is exponential, the way gravity increases exponentially as one gets closer to the center of a black hole. To demonstrate, Kurzweil plots crucial events in human history according to lists from 13 sources. These are an assortment of fellow futurists as well as traditional references like <em>The Encyclopedia Britannica. </em>The events vary somewhat, but most include the big bang, the first cells, the demise of dinosaurs, and the successive rise of railroads, telephones, computers, and the Internet.<br /><br />Linear x-y plots of these events over time are too compressed to be useful, appearing as nearly-horizontal lines for most of the chart followed by multiple events crammed into a near-vertical section at the extreme right. Logarithmic plots, however, consistently appear as 45-degree lines for each of the sources and their varying lists. This is what one would expect from events occuring at exponentially increasing rates of change.<br /><br />This was just a two-day house visit so I didn't get much past the introduction and the first chapter, but it was enough to give me the picture as Ray Kurzweil laid it out in this 2005 book. I'll get a copy so I can finish it, and rustle up McLuhan's book from 1967 for comparison.<br /><br />Meanwhile I did find <em>Our Posthuman Future </em>on my shelves, which was to be expected since I only read it in the past year or two. Author Francis Fukuyama was famous for his 1989 pronouncement that history as we know it had reached its end, but it seems that he found more to think about and write about by the time <em>Posthuman </em>was published in 2002. The subtitle, <em>Consequences of the Biotechnical Revolution, </em>is an accurate summary of what the book contains, and utterly consistent with what Kurzweil would be publishing three years later.<br /><br />I realized that I've been fascinated by futurism for a long time without realizing there was such a thing. I Googled "futurism" and found a good summary on the Wikipedia page. This explained that the term in its current use didn't really arise until the 1940s, with 50s and 60s writers like Toffler and McLuhan giving us plenty to think about. I followed a link to a Wikipedia <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_futurologists">list of futurists</a>, and recommend it highly. I found Toffler, McLuhan and Kurzweil there as well as architect Buckminster Fuller, astronomer Carl Sagan, and a host of people cited by Kurzweil in <em>Singularity. </em><br /><br />Curiously, the list omits novelist Wiiliam Gibson (<em>Neuromancer) </em>as well as Fukuyama, but it's a terrific start on the subject. Michael Crichton is there, and so is Gene Roddenberry. Wikipedia critics may find plenty to chew on from those included or omitted, but we'll leave the strengths and weaknesses of Wikipedia for another time.<br /><br />For now, I'll be busy thinking about the prospect of nanobots in my brain, the merging of virtual and real realities, and other possibilities I find somewhat disturbing but which may be inevitable just the same.Ted Knighthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00891911185898038632noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7539538901348807815.post-81715091356479431012010-07-27T06:32:00.005-04:002010-07-27T07:14:25.604-04:00Writer's Toolkit 1<span style="font-family:verdana;">First of a series. The trail of breadcrumbs goes way back...</span><br /><span style="font-family:Verdana;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:Verdana;"><em><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elements_of_Style">The Elements of Style</a>, </em>by William Strunk, Jr. and E. B. White. The slimmest little volume you never heard of until you decided to try writing and somebody said you might want to check out this book. Eighty-five pages of dynamite, good to dislodge those stubborn bad habits. Of course, if your own writing mistakes are too stubborn for even Strunk & White, then go do Your Own Thing and leave us alone. It's the granddaddy (<em>ou grandmère, s'il vous plait) </em>of writing guides. Ignore it at your peril. By the way, did you hate being subjected to French just now? Kind of make you bristle? From p. 81 - "Some writers sprinkle...with foreign expressions...with no regard for the reader's comfort. It is a bad habit. Write in English." My bad! Their good, er, they're good!</span><br /><span style="font-family:Verdana;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:Verdana;"><em>We'll be right back after the break. </em>I Love this expression from public radio. I often don't love what follows, especially if it's a promo for a station I don't like or a program I don't like, and too loud to boot. But the concept is excellent, a natural marker recognizing that thought can pause, that discourse need not be seamless to be good. The best of these refresh the mental palate, like a sorbet before the main course. Michael Feldman's program <em><a href="http://www.notmuch.com/Show/">Whad'Ya Know </a></em>does us the favor of using live jazz, piano and bass, throughout each broadcast. The breaks treat us to a minute or so of fine music before we get back to the comedy and quiz questions. At least, that is, when the big cheeses don't obliterate it with a promo for the Hockey Channel. </span><br /><em><span style="font-family:Verdana;"></span></em><br /><em><span style="font-family:Verdana;">We're back. </span></em><br /><em><span style="font-family:Verdana;"></span></em><br /><span style="font-family:Verdana;"><em><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Follett">Modern American Usage</a>, </em>by William Follett, revised by Erik Wensberg. Originally published 1966, revised edition 1998. Best I can remember, the original edition was a gift from my parents before I went off to college, which means the book had only been out a year or two when they laid it on me, as we used to say in those days. How did they know? I've often been guilty of thinking my parents were a lot like other parents, but with minor differences. Giving a brainy teenage boy <em>Modern American Usage </em>doesn't qualify as a minor difference...this is real Baby Einstein territory, I see now from my own adult perspective. The Baby Einstein reference suggests a kinship with those parents who play Mozart for their pre-verbal tykes, that sort of thing. In the case of my parents, it often took the form of not stopping me, simply getting out of the way while I strew breadcrumbs left and right in hopes of finding my way back...eventually. But active involvement was there, too. Just as when Dad gave me <em>The Best of S.J. Perelman </em>at the age of 10, or giving me a full-size <em>Random House Dictionary </em>at about the same time as the Follett, this was more major than minor.</span><br /><span style="font-family:Verdana;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:Verdana;">An awful lot about what the gift of a book can mean, but precious little about the Follett in particular, I know, I know. Here goes. </span><br /><span style="font-family:Verdana;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:Verdana;">Alphabetical entry makes it easy to use. Opening at random to <em>antecedents, </em>for example, leads to fully realized essays on nine types of antecedent problems and how to resolve them. The following essay on <em>apostrophes </em>tells you everything you need to know about the little buggers, no more and no less. This is the reference book every American writer should have at his or her fingertips.</span><br /><span style="font-family:Verdana;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:Verdana;">Thanks, Mom, thanks, Dad.</span>Ted Knighthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00891911185898038632noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7539538901348807815.post-62186449566324821412010-06-22T07:20:00.003-04:002011-03-21T14:58:24.867-04:00Define your termsI thought the phrase "First, define your terms" might have come from Plato but didn't know how to find out. Google to the rescue! Turns out it was from Voltaire, and actually went "If you would converse with me, define your terms."<br /><br />Seems that we routinely insert "first" much the way we add "again" to that movie line from <em>Casablanca, </em>"Play it, Sam."<br /><br />At any rate, a Wikipedia quote archive came up first in Google and I found it very interesting. It's informal even by Wiki standards, often in a question-and-answer collaborative process. Those who dislike the utter lack of centralized control endemic to Wikipedia should have nothing to complain about here, as it's obvious that no one is posing as an expert.<br /><br />Not content to take this on faith, I Googled the phrase "Voltaire define terms" (without the quotation marks) and came immediately to quotations on <a href="http://www.thinkexist.com/">http://www.thinkexist.com/</a>. The <a href="http://thinkexist.com/quotes/like/if_you_wish_to_converse_with_me-define_your/175628/">relevant page</a> not only confirmed the wording of the quote, but went on to list many other thought-provoking quotes from the French philosopher.<br /><br />I had known he was responsible for saying he would defend to the death your right to say things he disagreed with, but hadn't thought about it in a long time. What I hadn't known was just how many wise and wonderful things he did say, and how well-collected and well-presented they are on this web site.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.jstor.org/pss/420322">http://www.jstor.org/pss/420322</a> My Google search also yielded a good page from JSTOR, a scholarly repository I had visited before, but forget why. This article by Darius M. Rejali, a Reed College political scientist, is entitled <em>Define Your terms! Dictionaries, Medievals, and Thinking About Concepts. </em>Only the first page is available without logging in and I think that login is free, unlike some scholarly sites, but I didn't pursue it just now.<br /><br /><a href="http://stackblog.wordpress.com/2007/01/19/define-your-terms-such-as-say-jesus/">http://stackblog.wordpress.com/2007/01/19/define-your-terms-such-as-say-jesus/</a> Then there was this excellent blog post from John Stackhouse, a professor at Regent College, University of British Columbia. He explains that although most Canadians check the box for "Christian," most have an unclear picture at best of who Jesus was. This is discussed without religious fervor but in the academic sense, that in this instance as in any other, it makes no sense to try to discuss something without comprehension of principal salient points.<br /><br /><a href="http://gretachristina.typepad.com/greta_christinas_weblog/2007/02/define_your_ter.html">http://gretachristina.typepad.com/greta_christinas_weblog/2007/02/define_your_ter.html</a><br />Caution: explicit language. My search also turned up this blog post at the other end of the spectrum, in a sense. Blogger Greta Christina observes that reports of a study on teenagers and oral sex fail to distinguish between fellatio and cunnilingus, and eventually decides that it is the former that is really being discussed but not the latter. This post elicited several interesting replies. The point is well-taken that without "defining terms," the study's conclusions are without much meaning.<br /><br />All of this harks back to a question raised in my mind by the way we define words. <em>The Meaning of Everything, </em>as it described 70 years of writing for the first edition of the <em>Oxford English Dictionary </em>by volunteer conrtibutors, showed that it can be done, but that it requires consensus rather than submission to authority.<br /><br />Which brings me full circle to the Wiki page on Voltaire's quote, and the following quote by John Locke added by one of the people responding to the initial question about defining terms:<br /><br /><em><span style="font-family:verdana;">The names of simple ideas are not capable of any definition; the names of all complex ideas are. It has not, that I know, been yet observed by anybody what words are, and what are not, capable of being defined; the want whereof is (as I am apt to think) not seldom the occasion of great wrangling and obscurity in men's discourses, whilst some demand definitions of terms that cannot be defined; and others think they ought not to rest satisfied in an explication made by a more general word, and its restriction, (or to speak in terms of art, by a genus and difference), when, even after such definition, made according to rule, those who hear it have often no more a clear conception of the meaning of the word than they had before.</span><br /></em><br />Cited by Rowena Cherry from <em>An Essay Concerning Human Understanding</em> (1689) Book III, chapter 4. She mentions that she has studied both Voltaire and Locke. I now remember having read Locke and Paine and many others while at Duke University, and thinking at the time that Locke must be one of the smartest people who ever lived. There's nothing in the above quote to make me change my mind.Ted Knighthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00891911185898038632noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7539538901348807815.post-21154928387910321342010-05-21T05:57:00.005-04:002010-05-21T06:52:02.935-04:00Modern parables<span style="font-family:verdana;">It's one thing to follow the breadcrumb trail out of pure curiosity. It's another to look for The Meaning of Life. Gratuitous capitalization, I know, is a way to mask sincerity with apparent cuteness, the sort of post-modern affected emotional distance perfected by David Letterman. But the meaning of life, to drop the capitalized pose, is after all a trail worth following.</span><br /><span style="font-family:verdana;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:verdana;">I've always been more attuned to spiritual friends than to religious institutions. More than 20 years ago, friend Jim Shanley gave me a copy of a book called <em>Joshua, </em>subtitled <em>A Parable for Today. </em>It's by Joseph F. Girzone, who is not identified as a Catholic priest on the cover itself although I am told he is one. </span><br /><span style="font-family:verdana;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:verdana;">A modern parable it is, a modern telling of the return of Christ. No burning bushes nor thunder and lightning, but simply a quiet, humble man who appears in a smallish town and... I'll leave you to read it yourself if you like. Just to say that the author's plainspoken style and the lack of <em>sturm und drang </em>grabbed me more and better than any amount of fist-shaking or Bible-thumping.</span><br /><span style="font-family:verdana;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:verdana;">Fast-forward to the recent present. I had never forgotten the powerful impression this book made, but somehow never got around to re-reading it. Some time in the past five years, after what I think of as my intellectual rebirth, I finally read it again and was delighted to see it had lost none of its appeal. Just last week I got from the library two other books by Girzone, and plan to read them as soon as I finish a couple of other things.</span><br /><span style="font-family:verdana;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:verdana;">A couple of years ago, another long-time friend, Charleen Crean, lent me a short but wonderful book that turned out to be another modern parable. In it, a successful man of business receives a mysterious invitation to dinner. Even though he suspects a trick played by friends, he pursues it only to find himself seated at a nice restaurant opposite Jesus Christ, dressed in a business suit and very much a modern man of the world. I want to re-read this as well and will have to get with Charleen to remember the title. I seem to recall that like Girzone, this author also wrote sequels, so I should be busy for a while.</span><br /><span style="font-family:verdana;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:verdana;">But wait, there's more! (The return of cuteness, as the sincerity gets to be a bit much after a while.) A third friend, Brian Douglas, has introduced me to a world of ideas about the ways we worship together, and what has been happening to traditional churches. In our conversation he mentioned a book called <em>Kicking Habits, </em>and I asked to borrow it. Unlike my usual pattern of plowing through books helter-skelter, I'm reading this one a page or two at a time and really absorbing what is there. </span><br /><span style="font-family:verdana;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:verdana;">Author Thomas Bandy holds a post with UCC Canada and was formerly a Methodist clergy in Illinois. He compares the way traditional churches are bogged down in committees, endless talk and constant meetings to the way addicts persist in destructive behavior even while they know it's not working. This book is letting me take what I've learned about the relationship of recovery meetings to the groups that coalesce around them, and see an analogy with religions and congregations.</span><br /><span style="font-family:verdana;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:verdana;">I'm not sure where this branching of the breadcrumb trail will lead, but recently I found myself attending Sunday worship for the first time in several years. It was serendipitious, meeting a new friend and being open to his no-strings offer to tell me about his church. Thanks to him I met Pastor Renwick Bell, who seems to be a person I was ready to meet at this point in my life. Your imagination may lead you to picture him one way or the other, but you might be very surprised at the reality. Suffice to say that he and his congregation appear to be right for me right now. </span><br /><span style="font-family:verdana;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:verdana;">I have an opportunity to use my music in ministry, not as a paid professional (which I did for many years as an organist and choir director) but as an individual. This is consistent with what I'm reading in <em>Kicking Habits </em>and with the spirit of the modern parables. I'll never get preachy, and I may not mention this topic again, but I'm glad to find that my spiritual life is growing alongside my renewed intellect.</span><br /><span style="font-family:verdana;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:verdana;"><strong>Bonus breadcrumb: </strong>The Mitford books by Jan Karon. Episcopal priest Father Tim finds love and fulfillment in the small town of Mitford, unsurprisingly a lot like Karon's beloved hometown of Blowing Rock, North Carolina. Charleen introduced me to them on a visit to her home, surprised I had not even heard of them. I've read all of them two or three times and recommend them readily. She writes entertainingly, her characters are true to life, it's wholesome but never preachy. These are the kind of books that would make appropriate gifts for anyone from a hardboiled prison inmate to your white-haired granny. By coincidence, my friend Charleen's husband John is an Episcopal priest remarkably similar to Father Tim. John, you can expect an email alerting you to this post and to my renewed interest in spirituality, so look out!</span>Ted Knighthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00891911185898038632noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7539538901348807815.post-89210211478648621432010-05-11T05:17:00.004-04:002010-05-11T06:18:15.277-04:00Perception management<em>The Whole Truth, </em>by David Baldacci, 2008 (read 2010)<br /><br /><br />Nicholas Creel is a great villain. The flyleaf quotes him saying to his chief hatchet-man, "Dick, I need a war." As CEO of the world's biggest defense contractor, Creel isn't satisfied with the billions of dollars he's amassed. He sees his power slipping thanks to the collapse of the cold war, and the rise of terrorists, those pesky guys who distract superpowers from acquiring billion-dollar bombers with your basic SAMs and machine guns.<br /><br />Dick, the hatchet-man, sounds like a spin doctor. But Baldacci explains that perception management guys like Dick, PMs for short, are way way beyond spin doctoring. They manufacture a version of truth, a nice way of saying utter fiction, and pump it into our culture so efficiently that practically overnight, we all accept it as real. Creepy stuff, fer shure.<br /><br />Dick does his stuff, of course, and thanks to Internet viral marketing, the world meets Konstantin, a Russian who tells us by an amateurish video that if we are seeing this, he is dead. His family is dead. They were all killed by the Russians. The video spreads like wildfire, of course, and everybody buys in.<br /><br />Everyone, that is, except for a couple of pesky journalists and a tough guy named Shaw. No first name, just Shaw. I like pesky, by the way, and it seems to fit nicely a character slot useful to Baldacci and a whole bunch of action writers. If it weren't for the peskies, where would these plots be?<br /><br />Speaking of which, I like Baldacci just fine. No illusions as to literary merit, any more than with writers like Tom Clancy or W.E.B. Griffin, but I don't think that is the aim here. The idea is to write something readable and entertaining, and sometimes to slip in a cautionary message like Watch Out for Perception Management, and Baldacci succeeds admirably.<br /><br />Anyway, Shaw and the hard-to-kill and most attractive female journalist manage somehow to save the day, and it's all good.<br /><br />But learning that PM is out there did in fact get me thinking.<br /><br />Mere days after I finished the book, I happened to hear the Bob Edwards Show on XMPR, where faithful readers may recall I began this renewed life of the mind a few years back. The date was May 4, 2010, the 40th anniversary of the Kent State shootings. (If you don't know what that is because you are too young, or from another country, or for any reason, it's worth looking up.) I had what is probably a typical impression of the events of that time, but also typically without benefit of some interesting facts, facts I learned from the radio show.<br /><br />How about this for a fact? The National Guard, which shot the college protesters on May 4, 1970 in Ohio, has yet to reveal what they have learned about what happened that day. The absence of a class of facts becomes a fact itself, and the typical impressions carried by people like me persist without correction, like an unchecked illness.<br /><br />Or how about this, heard from the lips of a man about my age who was one of those present at the time, and interviewed on the radio show? The earliest reports, that protestors had killed a soldier, stemmed from a single story in the local paper, hurriedly phoned in by someone who simply got it wrong. That story spread like wildfire (still the operative word, none better) and even though the truth became known in just a few hours, even that was too late. Perceptions of people like me (all right, simpletons, if you insist, but careful how you sling those stones around that glass house, mister) that maybe the protestors brought some of it on themselves, although they certainly never deserved to die, what a tragedy - turn out to spring from a journalistic accident.<br /><br />A spin doctor couldn't have done it better. And who knows exactly how accidental that news mistake was. It's the kind of stuff conspiracy theorists live for.<br /><br />Meanwhile if Baldacci is to be believed, and I'm enough of a conspiracy nut not to think otherwise, perception managers are out there doing this sort of thing all the time, on purpose. Now <strong>that's </strong>creepy.<br /><br /><strong>Bonus breadcrumb:</strong> <em>State of Fear </em>by Michael Crichton, 2004.<br /><br />Global warming has been sort of like abortion. Once you decide where you stand, you are more likely to shape your own perceptions to fit your views than to change your views. Crichton took a lot of heat for this book, which is set smack dab in the middle of the global warming brouhaha. I just reviewed the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_of_Fear">Wikipedia page</a>. It quotes from <em>The Wall Street Journal </em>review calling it a novelization of a speech Crichton gave in San Francisco in 2003 in which he condemed environmentalism as a religion. The following review from <em>Entertainment Weekly </em>is closer to the mark, in my opinion, quoted below.<br /><br />"Part of the fun is that, for the first 400 pages or so, Crichton wants you to think of him as a right-wing nut. Don't be fooled. He's not just deflating global-warming environmentalists. When he finally gets around to explaining what he means by "state of fear," it's in another character-sputtered rant on "the way modern society works — by the constant creation of fear" by politicians, lawyers, and the media. Michael Moore, who made the same point in Bowling for Columbine, could've written the passage. <em>State of Fear</em> is one of Crichton's best because it's as hard to pigeonhole as greenhouse gas but certainly heats up the room."<br /><br />Sounds like perception management to me. Black is White, Slavery is Freedom, it's a <em>Brave New World </em>of Newspeak and <em>1984 </em>is way behind us.Ted Knighthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00891911185898038632noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7539538901348807815.post-81550537857439121812010-04-20T21:19:00.002-04:002010-04-20T21:27:55.066-04:00The middle way<em>The Way of Life </em>by Lao Tzu changed my life.<br /><br />I only read it once, as part of college studies in the history of religion, around 1970. I will have to re-read it to see if the breadcrumb trail is there at all, but as I recall the book was the foundation of a philosophy called "the middle way." To avoid excess or zealotry, to embrace the path rather than yearn for the goal, to seek moderation and not the extreme...these are the things I remember, and I wonder how far I am from what is actually there.<br /><br />Mine is an English translation by Wittner Bynner, copyright 1944, a Capricorn Books paperback from 1962. Only 81 stanzas, just 75 pages even with Bynner's intruduction, and many lovely black-and-white illustrations.<br /><br />Less can truly be more.Ted Knighthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00891911185898038632noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7539538901348807815.post-53956415992779705372010-04-20T21:05:00.003-04:002010-04-20T21:19:37.119-04:00Neil DeGrasse TysonPhysicist-author Tyson was interviewed one day by Bob Edwards on XMPR and I had to rush to the store and find the book they talked about, <em>Death by Black Hole.</em><br /><em></em><br />How dare I think I can read something so recondite? As it turns out, non-experts dabbling in subjects way over their heads is a time-honored tradition. Besides, part of the point is that Tyson writes so well that you don't have to be, well, a rocket scientist to follow what he's saying. Even if you don't get all of it (and I certainly didn't), it's really, uh, cool reading.<br /><br />Tyson is a really cool guy, too, as it turns out. I haven't looked again but when I Googled him after reading this 2007 book, feature articles called him one of New York's most eligible bachelors. Forty-ish, an Olympic athlete, handsome and funny, a leading scientist among the scientists (not just the dabblers like me), and African-American to boot. What a fascinating individual! I wrote him full of praise for his book and he even wrote back a courteous thank you.<br /><br />By the way, this morning on the Edwards program I heard an interview with author Richard Holmes, whose new book is entitled <em>The Age of Wonder. </em>Turns out he's an authority on Romatic poets, Keats and Shelley, those guys, and he talked about the fascination many of the Romantics had with science. Not everyone, to be sure, but for many artistic types it was quite the thing to be up on the latest discoveries, whether it was something about the outer planets (Jupiter and Saturn, in those days), or what Darwin was finding on Galapagos.<br /><br />Holmes said we are in a new golden age of popular science writing, as so many brilliant scientists have found they can also write very well. I'd call Neil DeGrasse Tyson a wonderful and welcome case in point.Ted Knighthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00891911185898038632noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7539538901348807815.post-57924139463171121312010-04-20T20:37:00.007-04:002011-03-21T15:06:10.870-04:00The Meaning of EverythingIs that a great title, or what? It's what Simon Winchester called his history of the Oxford English Dictionary, and a fitting title it turns out to be.<br /><br />Visionaries, among them Samuel Coleridge, put the project in motion in 1860, but it was James Augustus Henry Murray who rescued it from chaotic enthusiasm. Sir James patiently set forth a system in which slips of paper would be received from correspondents located in every English-speaking country on the planet (mostly England and America), their contents logged and eventually compiled in the greatest multi-volume publishing enterprise ever undertaken. Its release in 1928, an astonishing 68 years later, was celebrated with an epic dinner for 150 guests, lovingly described in the pages of this lavishly illustrated gem.<br /><br />What did it take to find every word in the English language and give it a proper definition? Read the book and find out. Don't be surprised to learn that diplomacy was necessary to maintain funding for the massive project, the kind that policitians then and now would call folly, or pork-barrel.<br /><br />I was struck by the similarity to the <a href="http://dmoz.org/">Open Directory Project</a>, where I was a volunteer editor for seven years. The infighting, the flashes of brilliance, the dogged determination to keep at it despite the inevitable irritation that comes from working closely with a lot of brilliant and often eccentric people, each of whom is generally convinced that they know what is right, if only everyone else would listen - the Oxford English Dictionary had all of these things just as the ODP does today.<br /><br />I resigned from the ODP, also known as DMOZ, to devote more time to what we online denizens humorously call Real Life. The sobriquet is so widely used that it's often seen in its short form, RL. I can just imagine an OED contributor in, say, New Zealand in 1890, telling his wife "I'll be in to dinner in just a moment, dear, just as soon as I finish this definition for <em>zymurgy. </em>(Goodness, real life can be such a bother when there is so much important work to be done.)"<br /><br />If it weren't for compulsively addicted people like my hypothetical Kiwi, things like the Oxford English Dictionary and DMOZ would never be attempted, let alone completed. Let's hear it for the hapless souls who sacrifice RL for all the grand schemes that seem impossible, and yet somehow reach fruition. Hear, hear!Ted Knighthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00891911185898038632noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7539538901348807815.post-13716959183432028862010-04-20T20:25:00.003-04:002011-03-21T15:07:41.614-04:00Our Posthuman FutureIn 1989, Francis Fukuyama made a famous announcement that history as we knew it had reached its end. Famous though it might have been, it was still news to me when I read about it on the flyleaf of his 2002 opus entitled <em>Our Posthuman Future. </em><br /><em></em><br />Can't remember for sure now, but I think this was one I picked up from Daedalus Books, the online and mail-order remainder house. I've found some great books from them, and saved a bundle in the process. That same flyleaf, for example, sets the price for this hardcover at $25, but I probably bought it for five or six bucks. Unless, of course, it's one I heard about on Bob Edwards' radio program, and dashed out and paid full price for. But I doubt it.<br /><br />Anyway, Fukuyama had had a few years to reconsider whether he wanted to stand by his earlier pronouncement when he came out with <em>Posthuman. </em>He doesn't exactly repudiate what he said, but he sure finds some new stuff to talk about, the kind of stuff that will make new history after all. Mostly he looks at the social consequences of genetic engineering, foreseeing as inevitable a capitulation to parents on the subject of optimized offspring.<br /><br />This is strong stuff, a fitting non-fiction companion to Michael Crichton's fictional <em>Next. </em>The next thing being post-human humans, of course.<br /><br />If this has whetted your appetite, go for it.Ted Knighthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00891911185898038632noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7539538901348807815.post-85697595273630251002010-04-13T20:47:00.003-04:002010-04-13T21:17:21.101-04:00Lincoln ChildI'll never catch up. A friend poked me lightly to say I hadn't posted in a while, and I thought I was due for the current month. Turns out that was last month. It's been two months since I sat down to write, yikes!<br /><br />I've been busy, yeah, yeah, so what? We're all busy yadda yadda so there's no excuse.<br /><br />Anyway I spotted something by Lincoln Child and decided to give him a try. <em>Terminal Freeze </em>turned out to be, well, a page-turner. Not for me to eschew the well-worn cliché, especially when it fits so well.<br /><br />Lincoln Child writes thrillers with a science background. He may write lots of other stuff but I'm in too big a hurry to do the research. Very busy, you know. At any rate, <em>Terminal Freeze </em>retreads ground covered by Michael Crichton in <em>Next, </em>at least to some small extent. I mean that in a good way, because he does it so well. Besides, if you ask me, in <em>Next, </em>Crichton was echoing his own <em>Jurassic Park</em>. You're not asking me, I know, but if you don't agree - hey, start your own blog.<br /><br />Again, Child writes well. That's really all I ask. Somebody said there are only seven plots anyhow, so you're always going to be using something somebody used before. Just do it well, OK? Thanks.<br /><br />Speaking of next, after the Arctic Circle adventure, the library coughed up Child's <em>Utopia. </em>Now we're really talking. A slightly off-kilter computer scientist whose belief in machine learning earned him disrespect from his peers but a blank check from a fabulously wealthy illusionist, who with his help builds the ultimate theme park. Then he dies (the illusionist, not the scientist) and the scientist is dismayed as the bean counters betray the founder's vision in favor of gift shops and casinos. Boo, hiss!<br /><br />I love stories with a fabulously wealthy character conveniently inserted, don't you? Look at what Jack Nicholson's hospital mogul capitalist did for <em>The Bucket List. </em>Insert endless additional examples here...<br /><br />Getting back to <em>Utopia </em>(which come to think of it, is an odd locution - anyone lucky enough to find utopia would hardly leave, a necessary precursor to "getting back"), the scientist conveniently has a fourteen-year old daughter who accompanies him on a business meeting to the theme park, and who naturally falls into the path of (evil music here) bad guys.<br /><br />Add not one but two brainy and very attractive women, one a business type and the other a fellow off-kilter computer scientist (guess which one our protagonist ends with, go on, guess), and then a highly trained James Bondish type "bodyguard" who happens to be vacationing with his dorky in-laws when the excrement hits the ventilation device, and decides to join forces with the first scientist.<br /><br />Might sound cartoonish, and hey, if you can't go for this sort of thing then you already stopped reading long ago, so the heck with you. For the rest of us, Lincoln Child is a real winner. Sometimes you want to know why networks behave non-intuitively, or learn about the inner workings of human language, or watch a documentary on the history of metallurgy. Sometimes you just want to escape into a land where the good guys stop the bad guys from blowing stuff up and getting away with computer secrets worth a hundred million dollars, preferably hurting them badly in the process, and oh yes, saving a sweet teenager and a couple of beautiful women from harm. Add some decent science as a backdrop, and you've got a winner, at least in my book.<br /><br />P.S. Not to be confused with Lee Child. The other L. Child writes action thrillers around a recurring character named Jack Reacher. Lean, tall, a hard case capable of killing with his bare hands but only in the pursuit of worthy causes. A complete independent, travels with only a toothbrush, wiring "home" for money earned while in some branch of special forces, from which he was pressured to resign after learning all these advanced combat skills. He only gets enough money for bus fare and cheap motels, and to buy a T-shirt and jeans he will wear until they get too dirty. Throw away, repeat...<br /><br />I like Lee Child, too. But not to be confused with Lincoln Child.Ted Knighthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00891911185898038632noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7539538901348807815.post-49961400200026681212010-04-13T20:31:00.004-04:002010-04-13T20:46:54.962-04:00FreakonomicsJimi Hendrix said he would "wave his freak flag high." Frank Zappa warned us, or our parents, actually, about "hungry freaks, daddy." Steven J. Levitt called his off-kilter take on economics "freakonomics" not only because his conclusions made him freakish by the standards of conventional economics. I think it's really because he relished not being asked to sit at the economists' table in the college cafeteria. He likes being a freak, and you know what, so do I.<br /><br />I am surely not alone. Even if Frank Zappa fans will always be relatively few and far between, Hendrix sold bajillions of albums to people who recognized a fellow traveler. And I was impressed but not all that surprised to read on the Wikipedia entry for Levitt's book <em>Freakonomics </em>that it sold four million copies. There must be lots of us freaks around, or maybe we're not as freaky as we'd like to believe.<br /><br />Jerry Maguire's character loved to say, "Show me the money!" Levitt might not say "show me the data" in so many words, but that is surely his message. Like my friend Ted (whose comment appears on an early post, and who may weigh in on this one as well), Levitt is not exactly scornful of bad logic (or in the other Ted's case, bad science). He simply keeps asking for the backup. And if it's not forthcoming, he goes out and finds it, and lets the conclusions fall where they may.<br /><br />This is good logic, or good science. Look at the data first, <strong>then </strong>draw your conclusions. Everyone knows you're not supposed to start with conclusions you'd like to support, then dig around to find some. So why do economists, and scientists, and lots of the rest of us, keep doing just that?<br /><br />Maybe we're human. Maybe we should shake the dust off our freak flags and start waving.<br /><br />One last word about Zappa's "hungry freaks, daddy." Daddy was as in daddy-o, not the paternal parent, at least in my opinion. When it comes to parents, we (I'm a Boomer, of course) are not only the people our parents warned us about, we are our parents as well. I just became a grandpa for the first time, and I'm as pleased and giggly as my own dear dad was when my daughter, the new mother, was a newborn herself. It's not so bad, in fact it's really great.<br /><br />You want to know why he called it <em>Freakonomics" </em>Read the sucker, or least Google it for the Wikipedia page, and read that. What could be more 21st-century?Ted Knighthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00891911185898038632noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7539538901348807815.post-20509973790224284862010-02-24T04:50:00.003-05:002010-02-24T05:15:47.284-05:00James Mason Book ClubMy friend Rick is a fellow traveler on the breadcrumb trail, and he's done something for us book-o-philes that I could only dream of doing...created a book club that's about books and ideas as opposed to being just another sales scheme. Check out the <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/group/members/25350.THE_JAMES_MASON_CLASSIC_BRITISH_BOOK_CLUB">James Mason Classic British Book Club</a>. I've known about it since Rick started it but only finally joined just now. I think I'm member #677, so I'm no longer exactly in on the ground floor, but I'm glad to be among friends online. Rick moderates the discussions, so it's no surprise this is a place for civilized discourse instead of flaming and trolling. But I suspect book-lovers tend toward courtesy without too much interference...or am I just being naive?Ted Knighthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00891911185898038632noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7539538901348807815.post-57272931982433809522010-02-10T05:45:00.007-05:002010-02-10T06:41:23.417-05:00A dozen authorsIsaac Asimov. When I read <em>An Anthology of Modern Science Fiction </em>from my father's shelves, it started me on a lifelong appreciation of the genre. I gave the well-thumbed (to put it mildly, more like falling-apart) hardbound to my nephew when he came of age, so I can't even be sure if an Asimov story was in it, but let's just say he can stand for the whole principle of sci-fi giving me stuff to think about. In this case <em>The Foundation Trilogy </em>supposed there could be a Plan, stored on a tiny cube that would project itself onto walls. A Plan for humanity, and society, the galaxy, maybe the whole universe. Grand thinking, mind-blowing without the foreign substances.<br /><br />Greg Bear. More excellent sci-fi. <em>Darwin's Radio </em>put the idea in my head that long-dormant strands of genetic material could awaken, with, um, interesting results.<br /><br />Joanne Harris. Would it be politically incorrect to say I am drawn to female novelists for a certain quality of ideas? Maybe it's the wonderful female protagonists they can draw. <em>Chocolat </em>was made into a terrific movie that inspired me to read the book. Then I had to go on to every bit of her I could find. I find a common thread in many of her books, an uncommon woman and her uncommon daughter (seldom a significant male) making a life in a small and narrow-minded village. A woman of mystery, and often damn sexy to boot. Joanne Harris, you rock!<br /><br />Robertson Davies. Acknowledged as the greatest Canadian writer ever, I say one of the greatest ever, period. He also tends toward trilogies, and since I love trilogies, well, he da man as far as I'm concerned. Highly recommended: <em>The Salternon Trilogy </em>(starts with <em>Tempest-Tost) </em>and <em>The Deptford Trilogy, </em>which in its evocation of mystery and illusion takes us to worlds far beyond the provincial Canadian origins of its protagonist.<br /><br />Tim Dorsey. My favorite discovery of a small but remarkably productive sub-sub-genre, the funny Florida crime novel. Browsing a Books-a-Million to spend a gift card, I finally settled on <em>Florida Roadkill. </em>It was the garish cover as much as the goofy title that grabbed me, and I've been hooked ever since. Turns out Dorsey's a Florida fanatic, not the football team or the college but the state and its history. Grew up in Riviera Beach, a stone's throw from me (if you have a hell of an arm), and after a career writing for <em>The Tampa Tribune </em>managed to make <em>Roadkill </em>the first in a whole series of successful funny-florida-crime-novels. I own the complete set, about half in hardbound, an incredible extravagance for this otherwise thrifty, er, cheap reader.<br /><br />Carl Hiaasen. The Godfather of funny Florida crime novelists, of course. In fact, Dorsey's press says he's "like Carl Hiaasen on PCP" which is about right. Just as Dorsey wrote for the Tampa paper, Hiaasen wrote for <em>The Miami Herald. </em>(I think Ruth Rendell wrote for <em>The Miami News, </em>although there's nothing funny about her chilling crime novels and they're not set in Florida, unlike those of Hiaasen and Dorsey). Start with <em>Tourist Season, </em>you could do worse.<br /><br />Lawrence Shames. Bet you never heard of this funny Florida crime novelist, but you can thank me later. Try <em>Florida Straits.</em> Love the retired Mafioso Burt the Shirt and his little Chihuahua.<br /><em></em><br />Hm...five to go, gonna make this quick so I can get to my oatmeal.<br /><br />Kurt Vonnegut. Best novelist who never appears on official lists. In high school, after someone turned me on to <em>Slaugherhouse Five </em>and I began wading through his stuff, I could never understand why my teachers woulrn't even talk to me about him. I mean, it was like they never even heard of Vonnegut! <em>Player Piano </em>started it all, 1952 tale of a guy who lets them copy his movements so they can apply it to an automated process, then is fired. Sort of like <em>Brave New World </em>meets <em>Roger and Me. </em>Don't miss Vonnegut's <em>Breakfast of Champions. </em>Special mention: as a kid in Indianapolis my dad would take me to Vonnegut's Hardware. Turns out it was an uncle or something. Vonnegut was one of those Hoosiers known less for being from Indiana than more important stuff (see Cole Porter and jazz guitar great Wes Montgomery), so aside from the thought-wrenching stuff in his books, he gets an extra star for the accident of being from my own home state.<br /><br />Kinky Friedman. Much better-known as the country-singing leader of a band improbably called Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jewboys, and later for running for governor of Texas, he is also a wonderful mystery novelist. Don't let the punny titles fool you. <em>Armadillos and Old Lace</em> and <em>Elvis, Jesus and Coca-Cola </em>are wonderfully weird plot-strosities weaving the Kinkster and his real-life friends with ficitional murders in his adopted home town of New York City. The cowboy hat, the foul-smelling cigars, the noir slang straight from Mickey Spillane - great stuff.<br /><br />Garrison Keiller. William Gibson. Neal Stephenson. They each deserve a lot more than I can dish out at the moment, Breakfast calls, must feed the inner blogger.Ted Knighthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00891911185898038632noreply@blogger.com1